It is useful to look at history. Women have always worked (other than a particular subset of rich women and then, in the US and western Europe in the 1900s, a slightly broader subset of well-off women). It's just that much of that work was done in or near the home, and for most of human history men worked in or near the home as well. For almost all of human history, the effort made to produce money or food was co-located with "living". So women have for centuries taken in washing, been wet nurses, done piecework, sewing, knitting, fulling, felting, spinning, soapmaking, etc etc in a non-factory setting. This did not mean that you played with your children or really paid that much attention to them; it meant that when they were very young you kept them in a pen or tied to the bed so they wouldn't burn themselves, but could respond to their needs when they expressed them. After about age four you put them to work. Of course extended family/neighbors also were involved, but they also all needed to put food on the table.

Another reason we didn't have daycare was child labor. The history of child labor in, say, Britain is quite fascinating. Children were employed as domestic servants, coal miners, sales-kids, prostitutes, and more. In 1802, 1803 some regulations were passed; eventually children under age 9 were forbidden to work in factories and kids aged 9-16 were limited to 12 hours a day (60 hrs a week -- the Cotton Mills Acts).

It is quite fascinating to me to look at modern attitudes toward productivity and childhood. For almost all of human history the vast majority of children worked, from shepherding or scaring the birds away from the crops (which certainly could be more playful) to dirty and dangerous jobs. And now we talk about daycare or look nostalgically at a false past in which moms spent hours a day playing with kids. Time surveys indicate that even working parents now spend at least twice as much time with their children now as in 1965 [1]. Part of this is "productivity" -- we view spending time with our children as an important and productive thing to do, and in fact an economic investment. The kid is not earning us money now -- we need to invest time and effort into ensuring a return in the future. It's intriguing the stories we tell ourselves and how they affect our behavior.

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...